This invention relates to sheet handling devices and more particularly to a sheet feeder employing a retard means that sets the penetration depth of the retard means into a deformable sheet separator belt.
In the sheet handling art, it has been known to provide a friction roller working in cooperation with a closely spaced deformable separator belt for separating work pieces, usually in the form of sheets, from a stack and forwarding them one at a time to be worked upon. Usually, the retard roller is adjustable to provide for proper handling of sheets of different thicknesses. It sometimes happens due to improper retard roller adjustment, variations of sheet thickness, or more often a combination of both, that a sheet will not be accurately fed and two sheets will be forwarded instead of one. Such an operation is undesirable since it may, for example, impair the efficiency of the following work step or provide, without warning, unacceptable duplicates or cause subsequent machine jams.
Since the penetration depth of the retard roller into the deformable retard belt is critical, adjustments on prior art devices for different sheet thickness and characteristics were tedious, time consuming, and often times inaccurate.
It is, therefore, an object of the present invention to improve said prior art devices by including a means to set the proper penetration depth of a retard roller into a deformable sheet separator belt.
It is another object of this invention to provide an easily adjustable retard means to compensate for different paper characteristics.
A further object of this invention is to provide a method of quickly and easily removing and replacing sheet separator belts.